Locomotion

A virtual reality locomotion demonstration

See also: Locomotion Methods, Teleportation and Redirected walking

Locomotion refers to the methods used to move a user through virtual worlds in virtual reality (VR) and, to a lesser extent, augmented reality (AR). Because a person wearing a head-mounted display occupies a fixed physical area while the virtual environment can extend far beyond it, locomotion techniques must reconcile the limits of the real space and the positional tracking system with the freedom of movement expected inside the virtual scene. The choice of technique affects immersion, ease of use, fatigue, and the likelihood of cybersickness.

Locomotion methods

See also: Locomotion Methods

Method	Type	Required Devices	Description	Pros	Cons	Creator	Examples
ArmSwinger	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Players move by swinging their arms as if they are running but do not move their legs.	More immersive than teleportation Works in most types of games and experiences	Cannot use weapons or perform actions with hands while moving.	Http://electricnightowl.com/
Astral body	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	First person when you need to interact with the environment, Third person when you need to run around in the environment	Easy to navigate and interact Clean	Immersion breaking for some	???	Https://store.steampowered.com/app/751300/Alice Mystery Garden/ Alice Mystery Garden
Blink	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Builds upon Teleportation to create 3 more types of movement techniques called Cinematic Blink, Precision Blink and Volume Blink	Reduce simulator sickness Allows for the scaling of play space sizes	???	Cloudhead Games	The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed
Bobbing-Walking	Standing Room-scale VR	Head-mounted display	Bob or shake the HMD to move, you'll need to run or bounce in place to activate the mechanism,	???	???	Http://cubic9.com/ cubic9
Charge Float Jump	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Input Devices	The longer you hold the jump button, the higher you will rise in the VR space.			Crytek
Climbing	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Players climb up walls, mounts and other objects by swinging their hands and pulling triggers to grab.	No VR sickness	Can pretty much only travel vertically		The Climb Climbey
Cloudstep	Seated	Input Devices	Using the analog stick from a gamepad, players will move in that direction in discreet steps, similar to miniature teleportations. This method removes all vection, hence eliminating simulator sickness with first person locomotion.	Reduces simulator sickness and improve player comfort	???	IrisVR VR Bits	Technolust
Cockpit / Vehicle	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	Have a cockpit around the player prevents VR sickness, it allows most players feel they are within a stable environment	Reduces VR sickness	Only applicable in certain situations such as Driving, Spacecraft and Mech games.	???	Gunjack Elite Dangerous EVE: Valkyrie
Environmental Redirection	Room-scale VR	None	Design the game in a way to allow the player to move in circles in the play area. Players will never hit physical walls of the play area.	No VR sickness No artificial locomotion or teleport	Requires meticulous game design, large play area requirement	Triangular Pixels	Unseen Diplomacy
Flight	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	Fly through the air with gaze as directional input.	???	???	Eagle Flight	Eagle Flight
Focal Point VR	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	To move small distances, Grip and drag the environment. To move large distances, place 2 focal points on the ground with the controllers then rotate, scale, and translate the world.	No VR sickness	???	Albert Hwang
Freedom Locomotion System	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Collection of various standing and room-scale locomotion solutions with CAOTS as its fundation.			Https://hugerobotvr.com/ HUGE ROBOT
HMD Position Acceleration	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	Initiating movement by looking in the direction you want to go. You tilt your head forward, you move forward. Tilt your head backwards, and you go backwards.			Crytek
Hallway	Room-scale VR	None	Player walks down a long hallway that rotates slightly with each step, forcing the player to turn to the right and leading them to walk in circles around the play area.	???	May cause simulator sickness	/u/qwv4851
Handwalking	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	HTC Vive Motion Controller	…a Virtual Reality experience which takes places in planetary dream worlds. You explore artistically designed planets with a completely new concept, defining and navigating your avatar in a distinctive way, using hand motion controllers.	Reduced till no VR sickness. Easy to handle. Intuitive. Feels rewarding. Gliding possible.	Can only be applied to special movement concepts.	Nico Uthe	Lucid Trips
Holosphere	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Whenever you move or rotate, a geodesic sphere appears around your entire view point and blurs everything else in the environment. The geodesic sphere disappears when you stop moving or rotating.	No nausea	Geodesic sphere appears when moving / rotating	Tomáš "Frooxius" Mariančík	Neos: The Origin
Immersive Movement	Standing Room-scale VR Running-in-place	Motion-tracked controllers	Hold a button on one of the controllers then run in place to move in VR.	Can use one of the hands to interact with environment while moving	???	Https://highsight.itch.io
Lean-To-Move	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Press a trigger on controller to record your origin, lean beyond the boundary threshold to move in game, return to origin to stop	Mitigates VR sickness Frees up the hands while moving Move for longer without being fatigued	Can drift from center of play area, difficult to turn	Https://github.com/Erupac/LeanToMove
Ninja Run VR	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers in both hands	Stretch both arms in the opposite direction of your desired movement while lean in the same direction of desired movement	No nausea or motion sickness	Takes time to travel, can be tiring over long distances	Sean Hall	Shaolinja
Omnidirectional elevator	Room-scale VR	None	An elevator that can go in All directions	Simple Fun Not exhausting	Picky people will claim it makes them feel sick, Players are locked to their elevator.	???	???
PocketStrafe	Standing Room-scale VR Running-in-place	Smartphone	Run PocketStrafe app on the smartphone, place the smartphone in your pocket, run in place to move.	Unlike other running-in-place locomotion methods PocketStrafe frees up the hands and the controllers.	Requires smartphone	Http://www.coolfont.co/ Cool Font
Pull	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Input Devices	Pulling the environment around you with your hands.	Makes you feel a bit like superman.	Feels super awkward, does not work well in multiplayer.	???	???
RIPmotion	Standing Room-scale VR Running-in-place	Motion-tracked controllers	Put hands at your hips, press a button on each controller and run in place to move	Immersion Proprioceptive and vestibular engagement VR sickness reduction Decouples head and body movement Fitness	Cannot interact with object with hands while moving,	Http://smirkingcat.software/ripmotion/ Ryan Sullivan
Real world space	Room-scale VR	None	Users move in real world spaces.	Very realistic and immersive	Cannot function with large movements, Spaces are often limiting, spaces have to be designed for physical movement	???	???
Room-scale vehicle	Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Entire play space becomes the inside of the vehicle, operate the controls in the vehicle to move the vehicle	???	???	Hover Junkers	Hover Junkers IronWolf VR
Shoot'n'Pull	Standing Room-scale VR	HTC Vive Motion Controller	Tower Tag offers an intuitive method of movement which gives the game a very dynamic gaming experience without the risk to cause motion sickness. Despite the relatively small space requirements.	No VR sickness. Easy to handle. Intuitive. Feels rewarding.	Fits only to one movement concept.	VR-Nerds GmbH	Tower Tag
Skier	Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Moving the controllers backwards and below your waist causes the skier to propel himself forward.	???	???	/u/qwv4851
Snap N'Motion	Room-scale VR	None	When the player is about to hit a wall in real life, the character in VR instantly turns 180 degrees (face backwards). It forces the player to turn around in real life in order to move forward again.	Room-scale VR experience with limited physical space.	Constantly changing directions can be disorientating and unnatural.	RetroPlayGamerTV	???
Swimming	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Hold the triggers on the controllers then stroke or peddle to move.	???	Only used for water and underwater environments.	???	Ocean Rift
Teleportation	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	Aim or point at a destination and press a button to relocate there instantly, usually with a short visual transition.			N/A	Vanishing Realms The Lab Budget Cuts
Third-person	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Input Devices	Player's POV trails comfortably behind their character, works for third-person games with gamepads	Very easy to implement No need for motion-tracked controllers	Less immersive, can cause VR sickness		Lucky's Tale
Tunneling	Standing Seated	Input Devices	The face-locked viewport ("tunnel") displays continuous motion and allows the user to steer the player like an FPS-style game. The peripheral view remains at the point of origin, so there is no controller-induced vection in the periphery.	Reduces VR sickness when moving with controller / gamepad	???	???	???
WalkAbout	Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	After reaching edge of playable space', virtual world is blurred and grid appears. Virtual world shifts to encompass open play area, forcing player to turn and face it. At this point the virtual world comes back into focus and grid disappears.	???	???	Tekton Games	The Dark Within
World Rotation	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked Controllers	You pull a trigger, then move the controller left or right to rotate the world.			Crytek
World Rotator	Room-scale VR	None	Moving to the edge of the play area causes time to freeze and locks the world to the player's rotation. A HUD appears and shows the amount of open space in front of the player.	???	???	/u/qwv4851

Taxonomy of techniques

A widely cited classification by Costas Boletsis (2017) groups VR locomotion into four types: motion-based, room scale-based, controller-based, and teleportation-based. The types are distinguished along three dimensions: the interaction type (physical body movement versus artificial input through a device), the VR interaction space (an open, effectively unbounded space versus a limited physical area), and the VR motion type (continuous movement versus non-continuous movement). Motion-based and room scale-based techniques rely on physical interaction, controller-based and teleportation-based techniques rely on artificial interaction, and teleportation is the only one of the four that produces non-continuous motion.

In practice these categories map onto a smaller set of approaches: walking in a tracked physical space, mechanical aids such as omnidirectional treadmills, software techniques such as redirected walking, artificial (smooth) locomotion driven by a controller, teleportation, dash, gesture methods such as arm-swinging and walking-in-place, and seated vehicle or cockpit movement.

Physical movement

The most direct method is real walking within the range of the positional tracking devices, commonly called room-scale VR. The HTC Vive, released in April 2016 and developed with Valve, was one of the first consumer systems built around room-scale tracking, using the Lighthouse base stations of SteamVR to cover a walkable area. The main constraint is the size of the physical space: walls and furniture limit how far a user can advance. The original Oculus Rift CV1 and PlayStation VR launched with forward-facing tracking aimed more at seated and standing experiences than at walking across a room.

Redirected walking is a software technique that lets a user explore a virtual space larger than the physical room by imperceptibly rotating or scaling the virtual scene so that a path that feels straight in VR becomes a curved or constrained path in reality. It was introduced by Razzaque, Kohn, and Whitton in 2001. Later perceptual studies established detection thresholds for the manipulation: a straight virtual path can be bent onto a circular arc with a real-world radius of roughly 22 m before most users notice the redirection, which means large dedicated tracking areas are still required for fully unconstrained redirected walking.

Omnidirectional treadmills aim to let a user walk or run indefinitely while remaining in place. The Omni, from the company Virtuix (founded by Jan Goetgeluk), popularized the consumer concept through a June 2013 Kickstarter campaign that raised about 1.1 million US dollars. It uses a concave low-friction platform, special overshoes, and a waist ring or harness, with sensors translating the user's stepping into in-game movement. Virtuix later released a consumer model, the Omni One, which bundles a customized standalone headset and is sold for about 3,495 US dollars. A competing device, the KAT Walk C2 from KAT VR, is a personal omnidirectional treadmill with a footprint of about 1.2 square metres that supports users roughly 1.55 m to 2 m tall and up to about 130 kg, priced around 1,199 US dollars.

Artificial (smooth) locomotion

Artificial or "smooth" locomotion moves the virtual viewpoint continuously in response to a controller input, typically a thumbstick or trackpad, while the user remains physically still. It is familiar to players of conventional video games and allows free movement regardless of room size, but it is also a common trigger of cybersickness because the eyes perceive continuous motion that the inner ear does not. Turning is usually offered as either continuous (smooth) rotation or snap turning, in which the view rotates in fixed increments such as 30, 45, or 90 degrees to reduce discomfort.

A related option is the dash (sometimes called shift), in which a button press moves the viewpoint rapidly over a short, fixed distance and then returns to a stable view, compressing motion into a brief burst to limit the duration of conflicting visual motion.

Teleportation

Main article: Teleportation

Teleportation moves the user instantly from one point to another, usually by pointing at a destination and confirming. Because it removes continuous optical flow, it largely eliminates the visual-vestibular mismatch and is one of the most effective ways to reduce cybersickness; it became a default movement scheme in many early room-scale titles such as Robo Recall. The trade-offs are reduced spatial awareness, because the instantaneous jumps interrupt the motion cues the brain uses for path integration, and a weaker sense of presence compared with continuous movement.

Gesture-based methods

Several techniques use body gestures to drive movement without a treadmill. Walking-in-place detects stepping motions, often through controllers, headset motion, an inertial sensor, or a camera, and converts them into forward travel; it can offer high immersion but tends to cause more fatigue. Arm-swinging maps the back-and-forth motion of the hand controllers, usually while a grip or trigger is held, to walking or running speed. Comparative studies report that arm-swinging consumes less energy than jogging in place but generally provides lower spatial awareness than stepping in place, with real walking remaining the strongest of the three for spatial awareness.

Vehicle and cockpit movement

In seated experiences the user controls a virtual vehicle such as a car, aircraft, or mech. The surrounding cockpit acts as a stable visual reference frame that moves with the user's head, which the rest frame hypothesis associates with reduced cybersickness during acceleration and turning.

Cybersickness and comfort

Main article: Virtual reality sickness

Cybersickness is motion-induced discomfort, including nausea, disorientation, and eye strain, that can arise during VR locomotion. The dominant explanation is sensory conflict: the visual system signals self-motion that the vestibular system does not corroborate, producing a mismatch the brain cannot resolve. Contributing factors include low or unstable frame rate, high motion-to-photon latency, and a wide field of view, with simulator sickness reported to increase with field of view up to roughly 140 degrees.

Common mitigations target the optical-flow cues that drive the conflict. Dynamic vignetting (also called tunnelling) narrows the peripheral field of view during movement and restores it when motion stops, reducing peripheral vection. Snap turning replaces smooth rotation with discrete steps, and teleportation removes continuous motion entirely. A stable rest frame, such as a cockpit interior or a fixed horizon, gives the visual system an unmoving reference. On the hardware side, a high and stable frame rate (commonly 90 Hz or more) and low motion-to-photon latency reduce the perceptual errors that provoke sickness; a steady frame rate matters more than a high but fluctuating one. Tolerance also tends to build with repeated exposure.

Empirical comparisons illustrate the trade-offs. In a study by Boletsis and Cedergren (2019), walking-in-place produced the highest immersion and enjoyment but also the most fatigue and cybersickness, controller locomotion was rated easiest to use because of player familiarity, and teleportation was efficient for fast navigation but its visual jumps reduced immersion. A 2025 maze-navigation study by Hořejší and colleagues found teleportation produced the lowest cybersickness and a sliding (foot-based smooth) method the highest, with controller steering in between, while teleportation also lengthened the time taken to complete the maze, consistent with weaker spatial orientation.

Comparison of common techniques

General characteristics of common VR locomotion techniques

Technique	Interaction type	Relative immersion	Relative comfort (cybersickness risk)	Additional hardware
Room-scale walking	Physical, continuous	High	High comfort (low risk)	None beyond a tracked play area
Redirected walking	Physical, continuous	High	High comfort (low risk)	Large tracking space
Omnidirectional treadmill	Physical, continuous	High	Moderate	Dedicated treadmill, harness, shoes
Artificial (smooth) locomotion	Artificial, continuous	Moderate	Lower comfort (higher risk)	None
Teleportation	Artificial, non-continuous	Lower	High comfort (low risk)	None
Dash / shift	Artificial, continuous (brief)	Moderate	Moderate to high comfort	None
Walking-in-place	Physical, continuous	High	Moderate (fatigue)	Optional sensor or camera
Arm-swinging	Physical, continuous	Moderate	Moderate	Tracked controllers
Vehicle / cockpit	Artificial, continuous	Moderate	Moderate (stable rest frame helps)	None

Immersion and comfort ratings above are general tendencies drawn from the cited comparative studies and design guidance; results vary with implementation, content, and the individual user.

Input devices

3DRudder, Cyberith Virtualizer, KAT WALK, Omnideck, VRGO, VirZoom, Virtuix Omni

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